Penn State still owes Jerry Sandusky victims 'truth and reconciliation'

Associated PressThis booking photo of former Penn State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was released Saturday.

By DAVID STEELE
Those who follow the pursuit of human rights around the world are familiar with the concept and execution of Truth and Reconciliation commissions. The best-known of these is the one in South Africa in the 1990s, in the wake of the abolition of apartheid, and chaired by Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

It’s an ideal to which Penn State ought to strive. It needs a solution for the problem embodied by Jerry Sandusky and all of his victims, the ones whose testimony led to Friday's conviction on 45 counts related to child sexual assault and molestation, and the ones for which he was never indicted.

The problem encompasses the entire school and everybody connected to it, right up through the football program that employed Sandusky, the legendary football coach who built it, all the way to the school president. Now that the justice system has dealt with Sandusky, the university’s turn on the stand is next.

Sandusky did it. But who let this happen, and how - and why? The demand for answers will only grow from now on.

Penn State will fight it. The victims will fight back. The legion of Nittany Lion faithful, and those who literally and figuratively put Joe Paterno on a pedestal, will fight in their own ways, as they have since the beginning. In the end, there will be more verdicts, probably some resolution, some compensation, maybe some confessions or revelations.

But answers? Don’t be so sure they’ll come out.

Here is what Penn State claimed in a statement Friday night after the verdicts: “Now that the jury has spoken, the university wants to continue that dialogue and do its part to help victims continue their path forward. To that end, the university plans to invite victims of Mr. Sandusky’s abuse to participate in a program to facilitate the resolution of claims against the university arising out of Mr. Sandusky’s conduct.

“The purpose of the program is simple - the university wants to provide a forum where the university can privately, expeditiously and fairly address the victims’ concerns and compensate them for claims relating to the university."

There’s a germ of a solution in there, buried in legalese.

Sure, Penn State wants to “facilitate the resolution of claims” and “privately ... compensate them.” It’s not a stretch to read that as: reach a settlement that keeps this school from being financially wiped out by possible lawsuits and destroying what’s left of its reputation.

None of that sounds like much of a search for truth or reconciliation. More like damage control, actually.

No, a nobler goal is to take that germ of a solution, a program to bring the victims and the school and its community together, to its ultimate extension.

At Penn State, the former assistant football coach still had his run of the football building and the campus even after evidence of his depravity was known to so many all the way up the chain of command. The university needs a complete cleansing, through a joint, cooperative, rigorously honest and equitable process.

A process much like what South Africa submitted itself to for more than three years, when it decided it could never function as a united nation without all of its pathologies laid bare, without the oppressed being given a chance to be heard by their oppressors.

To see the true consequences of their actions - to know why it is unconscionable to value the institution over humanity, their own security and power over the dignity of their fellow men and women.

In South Africa, it was a painful process for all involved. Much of it was carried out on live TV. But it was felt that it was preferable to prosecutions through an unreliable (at best) justice system, or calls for vengeance and retribution, and reparations that would never fully compensate the victims.

The verdict at the end: it was worth it.

As Tutu himself said in the foreword to the commission’s final report issued in 1998, of all such attempts elsewhere in the world, “ours is regarded as the most ambitious, a kind of benchmark against which the rest are measured."

Imagine if, instead of the fight for justice for Sandusky’s victims, and to hold Penn State responsible for its role, dragging on for decades, burning up millions of dollars and bankrupting everybody emotionally (and probably some morally) ... imagine if Penn State took the truth and reconciliation route instead.

Imagine if, instead of a legal verdict and a press conference on the courtroom steps, this was how the closure happened, the healing began and the future welcomed. Imagine how much better off institutions like Penn State and college football and sports at every level would be - and how much better the people involved with all of them would live.

Imagine what the lives of the victims and their families would be like, knowing they were not only heard, not only vindicated, but actually made their oppressors better human beings.

Imagine if they all could bring Tutu’s words, spoken about an entire nation, to reality on one American college campus:

“We have been privileged to help to heal a wounded people, though we ourselves have been ... ‘wounded healers.’ When we look around us at some of the conflict areas of the world, it becomes increasingly clear that there is not much of a future for them without forgiveness, without reconciliation. God has blessed us richly so that we might be a blessing to others.’’

The scope of what Penn State has to do is overwhelming, as overwhelming as the crimes for which Sandusky has been convicted. But it’s been done before.

It now has a chance to do much more than “facilitate the resolution of claims.” For its own good and everybody else’s, it needs to take that chance.